52 #2: Looking Back At Tomorrow Review
Medium: Comic
Release date: 5/17/2006
Review date: 10/2/2024
Score: 6/10
I don’t want to just recap what happens every issue with these reviews, but the series is still doing a lot of set up at the beginning and there’s not a ton to analyze quite yet so - Elongated Man's wife's tombstone is vandalized to leave a secret message for him, Dr. Magus (the guy who invented the Metal Men superhero team) inspects Booster Gold's robot buddy and can't find any glitches to explain why its history would not be correct with this timeline's history, Dr. Magus visits Professor Morrow (the guy who invented Red Tornado (who died during “Infinite Crisis”)), who is considered to be an even bigger expert on robots and AI than Dr. Magus, who points out super villain scientists are being kidnapped (Dr. Sivana, one of Captain Marvel’s nemeses, was kidnapped last issue, forgot to mention that), Booster Gold's bot's history is still shown to be incorrect when Booster almost gets hit by a plane, the Question breaks into Renee Montoya's apartment and leaves her an address, one she follows and is then subsequently ambushed by Vic Sage (the Question), who hires her as a private detective for an unknown case. At the end of the issue Elongated Man confronts Wonder Girl at the fortress of Solitude after she finishes a broadcast dedicated to the deceased Superboy, where he accuses her of leaving the upside-down Superman symbol on his wife's grave as a message.
I will be honest, like I said at the start of the review, it still feels like the series is getting set up in issue #2, so it's a bit hard to judge what’s going on. I was kind of confused where the Dr. Magus stuff was going, and Elongated Man’s ambush of Wonder Girl at the Fortress of Solitude genuinely felt like a random decision; this is where one of the biggest flaws in superhero comics writing is its most apparent - am I the reader supposed to be genuinely mystified by Elongated Man and Wonder Girl’s conversation, or did I just not read some earlier comic before “52” that explained their whole backstory and relationship? I’m not 100% sure what’s supposed to be a mystery and what’s supposed to be given background knowledge so far this series, and it's kind of affecting my ability to judge what’s going on. I really hope we get more clarification in subsequent issues, because I’m starting to worry “52” might be incomprehensible with my decent, but not encyclopedic, knowledge of the DC universe.